December 2006

Pat and I both were off work this week (and Greta was out of day care : )) so we had a chance to visit with our families, have minor surgery (well, Pat did), and eat our way through the southern tier and central New York.

Sunday afternoon, we headed down to Binghamton. En route, we stopped at my most favorite restaurant in the world, Doug's Fish Fry. Yum. I wanted to share in the experience with Greta, so I gave her some of my fish. She was not as in love with it as I was, but I won't hold it against her.

We hung out with Pat's family for a while and ate my favorite pizza, Nirchi's. Double yum. Sunday night, we headed over to the Scott household for some holiday fun. Since just about all of us have kids now, it was a pretty early evening. It was great to catch up with everyone, though.

Monday was Christmas, of course. We had a nice day with the Reeds, and Greta got lots of presents from Santa, Mom, Dad, and Grandma and Grandpa Reed. Tuesday, we headed out to Skaneateles to have pseudo Christmas with the McCarthy family. Once again, Santa and Grandma and Grandpa McCarthy spoiled us all terribly. Greta got some more polo gear and two, count 'em, two velour jumpsuits (one Puma and one XOXO - holy cow!) Girl is stylin'.

Here's G.Rock in front of my parent's Christmas tree. Ooh, shiny.

Here's Greta playing with some of her new toys.

WARNING: Here comes a mighty rant of epic proportions.

Wednesday, Pat was due to have LASIK surgery at a place called [Name removed] in Syracuse. We got to the address published on their website and found that their office was being renovated and said they were at a temporary location. We had no idea where it was, so Pat called the place for directions. Come to find out, they had no record of his appointment. Awesome. As it turns out, the doctor had the afternoon off, so they couldn't see us. Um okay. So we turned around and drove the 45 minutes back to Skaneateles. I love driving an hour and a half out of the way and having to do all of the planning you have to do to have an infant away from you for part of a day. When Pat was on the phone with the receptionist, I was whisper yelling. You know, when you're yelling and whispering at the same time. I was SO MAD. This meant we had to drive back the next day and stay an extra night, since there is a mandatory follow-up the next day. Once again, so not cool with an infant. Oh, but [Name removed] gave us $150 off the procedure, which really didn't make me feel any better about things. I guess it was better than a kick in the pants.

Thursday, Pat headed back to [Name removed] for the pre-op stuff. They told him it would take half an hour. It took over three times as long. Everything checked out and he found out he's a candidate for LASIK, so he was able to have the procedure. That was supposed to take 20 minutes and it took over an hour and a half. These people are scoring some serious points with me at this point, in case you couldn't tell. Why did it take so long? Well, because the doctor messed up one of Pat's eyes. I'm sure I'll use the wrong terminology here, but the corneal flap was placed improperly, so the doctor tried to budge it into the proper place and couldn't. I won't go into the gory details, but the doctor had to basically re-do one eye and put a temporary contact on the one eye, which increases healing time and pain. FABULOUS. Did I mention that [Name removed] sucks? [Name removed] sucks.

Once we got out of there, we went to CVS to fill Patty's prescriptions. By this time, poor Pat's local pain meds were worn off and he was not feeling well at all. We finally got him home and he started feeling better by bedtime. Poor pup.

[Name removed] sucks, and they suck a lot. I would get out my thesaurus and use some different adjectives to describe them, but I think sucks is just perfect, so I'm going to stick with it.

To whom it may concern at [Name removed]: I hope you see all of the refers from our site and see what a crappy job you did, and then maybe you'll be a little more careful in the future.

Friday, stupid [Name removed] got Pat in for his follow-up appointment at 9:30, we packed up our stuff, and headed home (finally). Thank you so much for my parents and Phil and Becky for letting us stay with you and for watching the kiddo while we were running around dealing with this bullsh1t. (Excuse my language.) Can you tell I still haven't forgiven [Name removed]? Please don't go to [Name removed]. Tell your friends.

SERENITY NOW!

End rant.

The good news is that the vision in Pat's one eye is 20/20 now and the vision in his other eye is getting better. It should be perfect once it has time to fully heal. He has more follow-up appointments in a week and a month.

It's very good to be back home. I was nervous about being away for six days. I kept having bad feelings about things, but everything turned out fine. Cats were good and the house was good (thank you to Amy!!!).

Here's a picture Pat took of G on the drive home. Her face sums up how I felt as well. The static cling in her hair is quite cute if I do say so myself.

We're looking forward to staying in town for New Years (you couldn't possibly get me to leave town at this point). We'll be hanging out with our good friend Cimicata, who's in town for a few days. Yippee!

I've got more to say, but that rant kind of dominated things. I'll post a nicer update once my blood pressure goes back down.

It has been an insane couple of weeks, and I'm happy that Christmas is almost here so things can start to go back to normal soon. I'm feeling a little bah humbuggy at the moment, so I'll keep this brief. I can say that I'm looking forward to seeing family and old friends this week, watching Greta celebrate her first Christmas, and eating lots of yummy food.

It's official - Greta has been out in the world longer than she was in me! I don't know why that seems like such a huge milestone to me, but it does.

This weekend, we had more holiday festivities than you can shake a stick at. Friday afternoon, my team at work got together for a beverage and some unhealthy food at Quimby's (affectionately called "conference room Q"). After that, I headed over to RIT's convention center to meet up with Pat and Greta for Pat's holidays shindig. It was a family-friendly and early evening event, which was nice. It was so cute to see all of the Wallace Library babies all dressed up. In my head, I voted Greta best-dressed baby, but of course that's not an official poll. It was a close race, at least.

Saturday, the Vienneaus made an appearance. We hung out for a few hours and exchanged Christmas gifts. Vienneau said that one of the gifts he was going to give us would make us happy, and then it would make us sad, and then it would make us happy again. That kind of boggled my brain. We opened it up and found two DVDs with Pat and Fran Tie the Knot on the cover. (Happy!) Then, we opened up the DVDs and they were empty. (Sad!) Then, he told us that the actual DVDs would be coming in the mail by Thursday, (Happy, again!)

Saturday night, we headed out with some of my coworkers to my company's holiday party at the Crowne Plaza. It was quite an impressive party! It was great to see everyone out in their best duds and meet some spouses. We haven't had a holiday party in six years, I believe, so we were due. I decided to whoop it up a bit and enjoyed a few glasses of wine. Unfortunately, I had very little food all day and that is not a good combo. Franny got a little tipsy. The good news is that I don't think I did anything too stupid, and even if I did, there were at least some other people there to take any heat off of me. One guy actually took his shirt off on the dance floor. No lie! I wonder if he still thought that was a good idea when he woke up this morning!

Here we is at one of our many fabulous parties this weekend.

Today, my good friend Sara Lavery came over to meet Greta and hang out. She and Greta got along famously.

After Sara left, we headed over to Pat's grandparent's house to have some pre-Christmas festivities. Greta wore a beautiful outfit that her Great-Aunt Kish got for her, and she got to open her first Christmas presents ever. If this is a sign of things to come, this is going to be one spoiled girl.

Greta sez, "If rippin' don't work, I'll just chew my way through."

Handsome family in front of the Christmas tree.

This is going to be a long week at work, and Pat and I haven't started Christmas shopping yet or gotten our cards out. Yikes. Time to get cracking.

We have a bunch of updated pictures of Greta, and I thought I'd share the love.

Here's G.Rock after her bath the other night.

Fauxhawk represent!

Another post-bath picture.

Here's Greta sporting her new winter coat and hat. The coat alone is pretty cute, but, when coupled with the hat, things get a little bit too pimp-tacular. G's even got her money face on, and she's throwing up more gang signs.

Here's Greta before a recent trip to go meet Santa.

At the mall, post meeting Santa, we checked out some of those ancient, creepy Christmas displays. Greta wants whatever that short, bonnet-wearing gal is serving up.

Why is the mall so empty, you ask? Oh, because I hate crowds so much that I came up with the idea of going to the former Irondequoit Mall, now called Medley Centre, to meet Santa. (What's up with the spelling of "Centre"? Is Irondequoit the British district of Rochester, all of a sudden? Sorry, editor humor.) As anticipated, it was a ghost town. No line to meet Santa, even!

I’m on a constant (busy lazy) hunt for new music. There are a couple sites that have been very good to me over the last year or so. First and foremost, pandora.com is great. It’s a music genome site. You name an artist/band or song you like to set up a “station,” and they play songs they think you will like. You can click thumbs up or thumbs down for any songs they play while they are playing. If you click thumbs down, they don’t play it again (I don’t think). If you click thumbs up, I’m honestly not sure it does anything different (but I have to assume it does). Since I started going to this site, they have added advertisements, but they’re not offensive as far as ads go (no audio and no popups) and, hey, the site is free, so suck it up. The other place I hear a lot of new/good music at is Yahoo! Music. You list what genres and artists you like, and they play songs. You rate the artist, song, and album (x out of 5 stars). At first, it starts off kind of clunky and you may find yourself saying, “Why the heck are they playing John Tesh??” but then you’ll be saying, “Holy cow, how did they know I like this??” Oh, and if you pay a few bucks a month, you don't have to listen to ads. I'm as cheap as it gets, so I use the ad-free version. The ads on this site are very, very annoying.

So, I’ve got a lot of music I’ve found and I need to download it, and I’m too pious scared to steal it. Of course everyone has heard of iTunes, but did you know that you can dump your change into a Coinstar machine at Wegmans and get a gift certificate to use toward iTunes downloads? Coinstar will take a percentage if you want cash money, but if you want to use it toward iTunes, you get the full amount. Free money. Cha-ching! Another good site is emusic.com. The first 100 downloads are free and then they’re cheaper than iTunes. You pay a monthly fee, though. And you can’t get the types of things you would get at iTunes. I can get all of my obscure Indy music there, but you can’t get, say, Dave Matthews Band.

Hi all. My favorite thing about this time of year is all of the wonderful holiday cards we get. Even though I try to make a point to appreciate each one, I feel like a little gets lost in the hullabaloo of the rush of the season. This year, I decided to mention each person we get a card from, and if I have a picture of them, I'll post it on this here site! Our first card this year was from none other than Jonathan Raymond Vienneau and his lovely wife, Mary Ann. Here is a stock photo of them from the trailer trash ripper Pat and I threw before we moved out of our beloved apartment.

Okay, okay, so that's not the most flattering picture of the Vienneaus, so here's another one.

The second card we got was from Sara Lavery, one of my good friends from college. Usually she is doing something wacky. Here is a rare capture of her looking demure. Hehe.

If you want to send us a card but you don't have our address, email us (via the Contact Us section) and we'll give it to you! Then you can get a spanky card from us, too! It will be like we're penpals once a year.